AMD CodeXL & NVIDIA GeForce Tools To Help Devs With DX12 Optimization

AMD and NVIDIA will host several presentations during the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2016, scheduled for March 14-18 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. We’ve told you about many of them, but there’s still two very interesting ones we haven’t reported about until now.

Both NVIDIA and AMD will be showcasing their developer tools in dedicated sessions, with the overarching goal to help studios in their transition to the low level APIs (Microsoft’s DirectX 12 and Khronos Group’s Vulkan).

A new era is beginning in PC graphics; low-level graphics APIs and VR headsets for masses that introduce a new set of challenges for how to program graphics for next-gen games. This talk will cover the latest offering of developer tools for DirectX 12 development and VR. Developers will learn how to recognize the new API concepts through demos and walkthroughs, as well as how to profile DirectX 12 with the new Range Profiler. The audience will also learn how to take advantage of NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio Edition to develop VR applications.

AMD CodeXL is a suite of tools for software developers that demand extreme performance from their software and hardware. The new CodeXL 2.0 release introduces tools for game developers who use Microsoft DirectX® 12 and Vulkan programming. This presentation will review these capabilities, including: capturing and visualizing the timeline of a frame, analyzing multi-threaded host and GPU interaction, pinpointing hotspot API calls, exposing inefficient GPU utilization and much more. In addition we’ll review how to develop and build Vulkan programs containing multiple shaders, and analyze the resource demands of their generated ISA on multiple target platforms without executing them.
The presentation will also review CodeXL CPU Profiling and Power Profiling capabilities.

These tools should definitely help game developers in their transition to DX12 (and Vulkan), which is bound to gradually happen between 2016 and 2017. Overall, there are lots of interesting presentations scheduled for GDC 2016; while most of them won’t be live streamed, slides are usually shared afterwards by the developers themselves.